Adobe Elements vs Photoshop

Does anyone use or does anyone know if you can use Adobe Elements to create clothes and other items for SL? I have been told Elements is a downscale, more user friendly program then Photoshop plus it is less costly.

Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated...

based on the information at the following link, I would say you can't use Elements to make clothes since it doesn't support alpha channels.

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/printthread.php?t=1129


I have never used Gimp, but hear it is a low cost alternative.

I've been able to squeek by using elements so far, but I do have to work around the alpha channel limitation - while Elements doesn't have channels, it does support transparency, so, I export my PS files first as a transparent PNG, then use GraphicConverter (I use Mac OSX) to then save the PNG as a Targa with alpha channel. It's messy, but a lot cheaper than the $499 to upgrade. I'm sure there are other image conversion/ editor apps that could take the place of GraphicConverter in my workflow (including the aforementioned Gimp) and some of them could probably do the whole job by themselves, but it works for me.

See the helpful post here from Robin Sojourner on work arounds to create alpha transparancies in PS Elements.

/109/2b/71181/1.html

Please note Robin Sojourner and Chosen Few's advice for using Photoshop Elements may be version dependent. Using version 4, and following their advice, I was unable to create a targa with an alpha layer.

YMMV

Ummmm... Robus, I just made Michael download the demo of PS Elements 4.0 to test this (it took almost an hour to download and install, poor guy, and it had to be done on his PC because they don't have a demo for the Mac yet,) because I couldn't believe that they had removed this ability, and I'm relieved to say it still works exactly the same way.

You can't see the Channels, because there is no Channels palette, but when you Save Selection, it saves a channel. As long as you make sure that there's only one when you Save As .tga, it saves the channel as a channel, and it shows as a channel when you open it in PS.

When you upload to SL, it looks exactly like a file saved in Photoshop, with the transparency just the way it should be.

It won't work if there is more than one Saved Selection, though, and it's hard to tell. (You have to pretend you are Saving another one, and check the menu in the Save Selection dialog.) But yeah, if you have only one, it still works like it did.

(And there was much rejoicing.)

Edited to fix some sloppy wording.

Robus, I finally had time to test this in PSE 4, and it works just fine. There are a couple of easy ways to screw it up though. First, if you save your TGA as 24-bit instead of 32-bit, it won't have any transparency. Second, if you've got more than one selection saved, your alpha channel will wind up being 100% white. Make sure when you save your selection the first time, you name it "Alpha 1" and from then on, if you have need to save the selection again, make sure to either add the new selection to Alpha 1, or else replace it. Don't have multiple selections saved, or you'll have problems.

If you're in doubt, just go Select -> Delete Selection... and then delete everything listed, one by one. Then when it's all clear, make your selection and save it as Alpha 1.



I'll copy this info to the transparency guide in addition to posting it here.

I found it a pain to get TGAs out of PSE, and in the end I just used the Gimp, which I prefer. It may not have quite the OS integration that I would like but it works perfectly well, and the Windows version is a lot more integrated.

Well, Robin and Chosen, thank you for setting me straight. Not sure what I was doing wrong, but must've been one of the errors you discussed. I'm using full Photoshop CS2 now, though, so it hasn't been an issue. I'm just glad the functionality is preserved.

I did install GIMP on the laptop I was using with Elements, so I'd have an alternative.

Sorry to put you through the effort.

No worries on the effort, Robus. It's important to bring up questions like that. For every person who posts, there are a lot more with the same question who don't. It's easy for things to go wrong in PSE since you can't really see what you're doing like you can in PS, so I'm sure you weren't the only one having trouble. Hopefully your question will help a lot of people.

I agree with Chosen. Besides, Michael is thinking of getting the software, so it's really not a problem that he had to download the demo (aside from my guilt about asking him to; but that's my problem! )

And yeah, we need to know, when software changes. And it looks like this one changed quite a few things. Just, thankfully, not that!